


Be Careful What You Wish For

by sian1359



Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Crossover, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 19:28:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16290368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sian1359/pseuds/sian1359
Summary: Sheldon and the others learn of the Stargate Program and Atlantis.





	Be Careful What You Wish For

**Author's Note:**

  * For [debirlfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/debirlfan/gifts).



> This was probably the hardest thing I ever tried to write. I don't know what I was thinking when I agreed to try it, and I'm sorry that it isn't what my requester was hoping for. Once I got the punchline in my head, it was all I could think to do, but it still nearly broke me. Whether you hear their voices in your head like I did, or think it's funny, it's what I had in me (that had to get out).
> 
> This takes place after Sheldon and Amy live together, but before they've married as far as BBT. With Atlantis, I've fudged the timeline. It's after Season Five but I refuse to accept that Stargate turns 20 years old next year.

 

 

"Well, there you are. Where have you been?"

Considering he and Penny were carrying reusable bags filled with groceries, Leonard ignored the question and instead asked Sheldon, "You do remember you don't live here anymore, right?" at the same time Penny asked,

"I thought you got his key back from him."  

"Of course I remember," Sheldon replied, the whine in his tone still in full force.  

"Of course I did," Leonard said in answer, only slightly disgusted that his own tone pretty much matched Sheldon's. "I got back his key, his spare key, and his back-up spare key."

That, at least, got Penny to stop unloading the groceries for a few seconds and shoot Leonard a _sorry for doubting you_ look when Leonard put his bags down next to hers and pitched in getting things put away.

"Sheldon," she then directed toward their friend still sitting on their couch as if he was still Leonard's roommate.

"Penny," Sheldon responded, matching the sternness in her voice.

"Sheldon," Penny began again, holding up her hand when Sheldon opened his mouth, and then continuing when, shock of shock, Sheldon closed his mouth, "How many keys to this apartment do you still have?"

"Five," Sheldon told them with no remorse or guilt – or understanding as to why his answer might be distressing.

"I told you we should have changed the lock," Leonard said quietly, not that he cared whether Sheldon overheard him and not, unfortunately, successful in keeping Penny from asking,  

"Why do you still have five – why did you have eight copies of the keys for the front door in the first place?"

"To answer your first question, I still have five, because Leonard only asked for the three I gave him. As to why I had eight, the others were a copy, a spare copy, a back-up copy, the emergency spare, and the one I keep in my office at the University."

Said matter-of-factly, like that made sense and sounded reasonable, when no one else in the world does that.

Leonard just shrugged when Penny sent a glare his direction; like Sheldon's neuroses were Leonard's fault. He had enough of his own, thank you very much, Mom, to prey on someone else's.

"If you still had five keys to this apartment, why did you bother taking the key we gave you and Amy to hold onto in case of an emergency?" she then asked over the box of Corn Pops she was holding.

"I didn't use it today," Sheldon said quickly, now sounding defensive. "You said that key was to be used only in an emergency."

"Right," Penny said with a long nod before turning to put the cereal box in the cupboard and then walking away down the hall to the bedroom, leaving Leonard with a look and the rest of the groceries.

Leonard's not sure why she'd expected a different answer or why this is somehow his fault, but her _he was your roommate so this is your problem_ was as inevitable as Sheldon's reply.  

"I want all of the keys to this apartment you still have turned over to me by Monday evening," Leonard told Sheldon. "Except for the one Penny gave Amy and, no, you can't make any copies of it."

"Fine. But don't come crying to me the next time you lock yourself out wearing just a towel. Sparing you embarrassment is not my idea of an emergency."

"I seem to remember you are the only one who's locked himself out of this apartment. Maybe not in just wearing a towel, but didn't you keep your spare copy in your bedroom where it didn't do you any good?"

"I did, and I learned from it, thus the eight keys. Where do you keep your spares?"

"I have one in the glove compartment of my car, and the other in my desk at work," Leonard said, maybe a little smugly, but he was pretty sure Sheldon was expecting him to say the only spare copy was the one they'd given to Amy.

"I suppose it's right next to your registration, so when someone steals your car, they can just walk right in and steal your stuff, too. Boy, am I glad I moved out. If left up to you, I'd end up murdered in our beds."

_Or on the damn couch,_ but Leonard held in what he would have liked to have said and went with, "Was there a reason you were waiting on my couch for me to get home?"

"I thought you would never ask," Sheldon said with a big sigh of relief. "Of course there was. Is."

"And that reason is?" Leonard prompted, when Sheldon didn't continue.

"Do you remember May 7th, 2009?"

For a moment Leonard rested his head against the cabinet he'd just closed on the last of the groceries in the realization that he'd now been the one expecting a logical answer to his question.

"Sure," is what he said when he turned back toward Sheldon, because why not. "It was a Sunday."

"It was a Thursday," Sheldon corrected, affronted. "We had tickets to the midnight showing of the J.J. Abrams _Star Trek_ movie at the Arclight."

Okay, Leonard could buy Sheldon remembering the date tied to a movie premiere. That still didn't answer why Sheldon had broken into his and Penny's apartment.

"So, what, you want to do a re-watch, or something? It is the best of the three, but I thought you – "

"In addition to going to the movie that night, we had a guest speaker that day at work," Sheldon interrupted, and not even to take the cheap shot on Abrams, who Sheldon had never forgiven for the _Lost_ finale.

"Right. Some theoretical physicist who worked for the Air Force." Leonard mainly remembered being embarrassed when, afterward as the physicist had allowed the audience to approach and check out some of the moon rocks and components from some experimental aircraft he'd brought along, Sheldon kept handing out his hand sanitizer and complaining about being exposed to space germs.

"The physicist's name was Dr. M. Rodney McKay. Who I saw standing next to the President, the UN Secretary, the Russian President and several other world leaders, along with some other civilians and military types, two – " and here Sheldon looked over to the clock on the wall, "—hours and forty-two minutes ago on the television. Announcing to the world that not only did he have proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life in the universe, but that he's part of an exploratory organization called Stargate Command. And that they've been interacting with aliens and visiting Earth-like planets for the nearly fourteen years. _Fourteen years_ , Leonard."

Sheldon certainly looked distressed, as well as excited; like he wasn't making this shit up, but then he also expounded on the histories and virtues of different flags on a monthly webcast, like anyone actually cared. And was surprisingly imaginative and creative when it was his turn to DM.

"Sheldon, I'm sorry, but I'm not in the mood for one of your weird practical – "

"Leonard, I don't think he's joking," came from Penny, who was running down their very short hallway, her phone in her hand. "Turn on the tv."

While Leonard still wouldn't put it past the two of them to be pranking him, Penny really wasn't that good of an actress for all that she'd been trying to be one up until a couple of years ago. Unlike Sheldon, she looked mostly dazed, and maybe a little scared.

"Which channel," Leonard asked as he started throwing cushions around, looking for the remote.

"I don't think it matters. It's on all the channels," Penny said, still mostly looking at her phone. "Even Wil Wheaton is broadcasting it on his webcast."

Sheldon, of course, was holding the remote, which he acknowledged only once Leonard started down the hall to see if it one of them had carried in off to either the bedroom or bathroom inadvertently. Sheldon clicked in on and switched from _The Walking Dead_ 's channel over to the local broadcast one that had the news reporter that Raj kept insisting they watch because she was cute.

Neither she nor McKay were on screen at the moment, but the President was, and as Leonard grabbed the remote away from Sheldon and turned up the volume, it became obvious that he was partway through a follow-up speech that sounded more like politicking than reassuring the public. Or introducing one of the aliens.

Leonard started flipping the channels. The President seemed to be on all of them, but Headline news had him on an inset picture and was using the Kyron for captioning his speech, while replaying what appeared to be the original announcement. Just as he bent to sit down, the front door was flung open and slammed against the wall as Howard, Raj, Bernadette and Stuart charged in.  

"Does everyone have a key to our apartment?" Penny asked, just as Raj said:

"So you are here. You didn't answer your phone half an hour ago."

"We weren't here then," from Penny, at the same time Howard said, "What do you think?", and Bernadette was asking Sheldon where Amy was since everyone else was here.

"Will you all shut up for moment!" Leonard shouted. "Let me listen to this."

"Listen, hell," Howard said with a snort. "Grab your computer. They've just dumped five hundred research papers onto arXiv.org, with a promise of another hundred to drop each day for the foreseeable future. The first one details how aliens create a portal to house a stable Einstein-Rosen bridge," he continued, brandishing his own laptop that he'd brought with him.

"And here is one titled Entanglement, Superposition and Teleportation," Raj added, holding up his own computer.

Leonard quickly abandoned the television for his computer. Of course, by now everyone who was even remotely involved in the sciences was now trying to access the site, but even as Leonard started to despair (and Sheldon was trying to wrest Howard's computer away from him), three mirror site links popped up on the initial home page. It only took him two more sets of mirror site links to get access but then Leonard paused, unable to comprehend the sheer scope of what he was seeing before him with titles like:

**Alien Analogs to Earth Mythologies**

**Creating a Coordinate System for Alternate Realities**

**Drawing Power from Subspace**

**The Effects of Solar Flares on an Einstein- Rosen Bridge**

**Interactive Holographic Technology**

**Multi-Dimensional Mathematics**

**Reversing DNA Mutations**

**The Science behind Hyperdrive Technology**

Leonard really had no idea on which one to click on first, but finally decided to open the one simply titled **Zero Point Energy Computations** byDrs. Peter Grodin, Radek Zelenka and Miko Kusanagi.

He wasn't sure he could even make sense of the brief, so he wasn't all that disturbed when Penny interrupted by saying,

"Hey, I have alien DNA?"

The same couldn't be said for Sheldon. "All of the non-scientists keep quiet!"

Sticking her tongue out behind Sheldon's back, Bernadette winked at Leonard when he looked up and said, "What do you mean, Penny?" Then, when Sheldon opened his mouth to protest, she added: "PhD in microbiology, monkey-boy, so I can probably reverse engineer the data in the paper here entitled **Lowering Mortality Rates in Genetically Altered Viruses** by a Doctor Jennifer Keller. So you can suck it! Unless you want to be my first test subject."

One of the redeeming things about Sheldon that Leonard had to admit, if only to himself, was that when he got caught out by his own logic, he yielded. Not that Bernadette wasn't one tiny, scary lady when she started hissing at and threatening you.

"Go ahead, Penny," she then said, all sweetness and light.

Penny looked a little unsettled, but quickly shrugged it off and turned back to whatever she'd found on her phone. "Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has put out an overview of some of the most important new discoveries and world changing events coming out of today's announcements. In one he says that not only are they confirming that Atlantis was real, and it is actually a city that's also a spaceship – "

Looking up, she interrupted herself to say, "How cool is that?" and then, after nods all around, turned back to her phone and continued:

" – apparently the aliens that built Atlantis co-mingled – "

And here she snickered before going on.

"—with the Denisovans, who are apparently one of mankind's early ancestors and not another alien species. So anyone who has Denisovans DNA, like I found out I have when I did one of those ancestry kits, has a chance at being able to work the alien tech you mere humans cannot."

"I want Denisovan DNA," Raj moaned.

So did Leonard, but Bernadette quickly spoke out, saying, "No, you probably don't. It seems like Dr. Keller got a lot of experience in genetically altered viruses and trying to invent cures because these Ancient Lanteans as they've been identified, pissed off enough other aliens to have been targeted with gene-specific plagues."

"I don't know," Penny countered. "It says Stargate Command is currently looking additional people who can work the tech, just to help them identify and catalogue a backload of items, no quitting your job and moving to another galaxy required. JPL is going to be one of the host test sites next week, and gene-positive people can sign up to help out for as many or as few hours as fits into their schedules, kinda like signing up with Lyft or Uber. Do you think they'll pay better than the ride-sharing or recharging scooters companies?"

"I guess we're going to go find out on – " Leonard looked expectantly at Penny.

"Tuesday."

"Tuesday afternoon, then."  

****

"What's got you looking so amused?" Rodney asked as John stopped at his office door and _leaned_. Not that John didn't look good leaning – or with one of his little _someone-did-something stupid_ smiles – but Rodney didn't need the distraction. He had two months of work to get done in two weeks, and he was expecting to get called to briefing with the President's science advisor any day now that they'd been able to release the details about the Stargate program. Obviously new curricula was going to be needed for all levels of education, which wasn't something Rodney wanted to waste his time working on, but it would mean he'd have a direct hand in shaping the way physics was studied and applied in the future –

"Why are you still leaning? And smiling? And ignoring me?"

John raised his brow. "I wasn't the one doing the ignoring, Rodney. You had that look again, the one you get when you're fantasizing about schools and streets being named after you."

Rodney waved off the remark although, since it wasn't so far off the truth, he didn't actually protest it aloud. "And you were just in a meeting with Woolsey, Landry, O'Neill, and a bunch of US Military brass, yet you're smiling. What's happened?"

John's smile turned into a grin as he stepped into Rodney's office, closing the door behind him and bringing around a folder he'd been hiding behind his back though he wasn't yet handing it over. "It was mostly the same bureaucratic bullshit they've all been like leading up to the public disclosure, but there was some good news. Teldy's getting her promotion, and the command of that new _Daedalus_ -class warship they agreed to station out of Atlantis. And the UN's offered Jennifer the Director-General position of their World Health Organization."

"Oh, good for her. I can't think of anyone better qualified, and now she can stay on Earth without feeling like she'd be wasting all of her experience in Pegasus."  

Rodney really was happy for her, but also happy that the sting of her rejecting his marriage proposal a year back was now more bruised ego than a broken heart. Of course, so much of that easing of the pain was due to just how good and nice Jennifer was, and her refusal to let Rodney feel bitter or spiteful. The man in front of him had also helped, along with Ronon and Teyla, and their refusal to let Rodney lock himself away in depression or his work. He might not have gained a wife, but he hadn't lost a friend, and now, well, maybe he was ready to chance his heart again. Once they got back home.

"So what's the folder about?"  

"This?" John said nonchalantly, so nonchalantly that it was obviously the true purpose behind John's stopping by.

"Just a collection of some of the posts, emails and letters the SGC's been getting since the disclosure. Fan mail, for the most part, including from some pretty famous people."

"Yes, well, now we're some of those famous people too," Rodney said, holding out his hand for it. "What, did you get a call from a Hollywood executive who wants to tell your life story?"

"No, but Tiger Woods did congratulate me on keeping up my golf game in another galaxy." John handed over the folder. "And at last count, Ronon has had three hundred and sixty-seven thousand, five hundred and fifty-five marriage proposals."

Rodney couldn't help but laugh at the letter on the top of the stack. Some police detective in New York City was taking Carson to task for letting the Air Force tell his mum and all of the others in the Beckett clan that Carson had died, when he'd simply gone MIA in the Pegasus Galaxy. They might have disclosed a bunch of things about the program, but there were only a select few, even at Stargate Command, that knew that cloning memories was a viable as cloning bodies.

He skipped past the rest of the stack addressed to Carson, glance briefly at some of John's, that was topped by the Tiger Wood tweet, and was followed by several more that seemed to be from famous sports people because John's priorities were totally screwed, until he found the stack with his name on it. Of course there were messages from Tyson and Nye, not the apologies he deserved from the way they'd treated him at Tunney's presentation, but what did he really expect from guys who spent more time in front of a camera talking about physics than actually doing physics? A few more from old teachers or colleagues that now wanted to be his new best friend – ooh, and a prestigious looking document on Cal Tech letterhead.

"What do you mean I'm being named in a class action lawsuit, represented by a Dr. Sheldon Cooper, for causing millions of dollars and innumerable years of wasted theoretical physics research?"

 – finis –


End file.
